Battle at the Box Office 5/23/22
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness remained at the top of the box office for probably its last weekend as Top Gun: Maverick seems poised to take it down this coming weekend.
Multiverse of Madness took in another $32.3 million over the weekend, taking it to $342.7 million domestic and just shy of $804 million worldwide. Multiverse of Madness’ three-week domestic total so far is more than the first Doctor Strange movie made in its entire run and Multiverse of Madness is currently 14th in the total MCU worldwide between Thor: Ragnorak and the first Guardians of the Galaxy. It is currently the highest-grossing film worldwide for 2022, having topped The Batman.
Downton Abbey: A New Era opened in second place with $16 million. That’s about half as much as the first Downton Abbey movie made when it opened in 2019 but its main target audience of older moviegoers is still the most reluctant to return to theaters after two years of the pandemic. It does have strong word of mouth from the audience that did come out to see it, with an A- Cinemascore and it could remain a solid counterprogramming to the larger blockbusters in the next few weeks. It all depends on how well it holds this coming weekend.
The Bad Guys dropped to third with another $6.1 million, bringing it to $74.4 million domestic and just over $184 million worldwide, which puts it at #9 on the worldwide box office list for the year.
Sonic 2 and Men rounded out the top 5, with Men just barely managing to edge out fellow A24 movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. The latter was much less than director Alex Garland’s previous movie, Annihilation, which opened to $11 million in 2018. It was slightly more than what Ex Machina made when it was at its widest theater count. Audiences apparently were not fond of what they saw, as they gave the movie an atrocious D+ Cinemascore, which will probably hurt its repeat business but its somewhat par for the course for A24 as movies like The Witch get promoted like a more typical horror movie and then it turns out to be more artful and slow than what audiences were expecting or wanting. For A24, it was still one of its biggest openings, sitting behind X from earlier this year and ahead of Zola. Speaking of A24, the previously mentioned Everything Everywhere All at Once is now officially its biggest movie domestically of all time with $52.2 million, topping Ladybird by around $4 million.
Further down the list, Firestarter slipped out of the top 5 with a 48% drop from last weekend’s opening, which seems solid but it was already a super low opening to begin with. The movie made another $1.9 million, which brings it to just over $7 million domestic and $10.6 million worldwide.
Multiverse of Madness still had the highest Per Theater average for the weekend with $7,125 in each of the 4,534 theaters it was playing in.